X Developer's Meeting

"...any decent installer..."

(I'll ignore for the second that a lot of distributions don't have a decent installer, and that this should be part of X, not the distribution, because that's insignificant in comparison to the real problem.)

As you say yourself, this is done by the installer! If I plug in a second monitor ... how is it recognized? (On my Mac, I open the Displays control panel and click "Detect Monitors", and it appears.) How do I set up Xinerama? How do I swap which is the left display?

I want to plug in my Wacom tablet, which I purchased more recently than I installed X. What voodoo do I have to go through to get it recognized?

Once you've got everything working, you decide to write a letter. You need to type characters which don't appear on your keyboard, like ü. How do you do it? The closest to a working solution I've found is to use xmodmap to set up an unused modifier key to send the keysym "Multi_key" (but I can't get it to work, for some reason).

I'm glad your automagic installer got you the right pixel depth and resolution for your monitor. I really am. But that's about 10% of what "configuring X" is. I've been using Linux since 1.0 and I still can't figure out how to configure X completely.